AidData Brings $25 Million Award to W&M to Establish AidData Center for Development Policy

Research center poised to transform the way
foreign assistance is targeted, monitored and evaluated

The United States Agency for International
Development (USAID) has chosen William & Mary to lead a five-year,
$25 million award to create the AidData Center for Development Policy, a
research center that will create
data and tools to enable the global development community to more effectively
target, coordinate, deliver, and evaluate foreign aid.

The award, the largest single award in
W&M history, is a part of USAID’s Higher Education Solutions Network
program, which according to the USAID website, aims to establish institutional partnerships that will
create and leverage a virtual network of leading experts who will help USAID
solve distinct global development challenges.

“I
am very proud of William & Mary’s leadership in this important
international endeavor,” said W&M Chancellor and former Secretary of
Defense Robert Gates ’65. "AidData is fundamentally improving the way the
U.S. development and defense communities track the distribution and impact of
their overseas investments. The AidData Center for Development Policy at
William & Mary will play a key role in ensuring that limited foreign
assistance resources are put to more effective use.”

AidData was
founded in 2009 as a collaborative initiative between William & Mary,
Brigham Young University, and Development Gateway and has established itself as
a global leader in the provision of reliable, timely and detailed information
about foreign assistance projects.

Today, it is
recognized as the largest public access database on project-level development
finance in the world, tracking more than $5.5 trillion and one million
development projects from 91 donor agencies.

The new
AidData Center for Development Policy, headquartered at William & Mary's Institute
for the Theory and Practice of International Relations in Williamsburg,
Virginia, is a joint venture between William & Mary, Development Gateway,
Brigham Young University (BYU), the University of Texas at Austin (UT-Austin),
and ESRI, a GIS technology company.

“This is truly great news, a game changer,” said William & Mary President
Taylor Reveley. “Our faculty is leading the way in aid policy, practice, and
research among U.S. universities. Mike Tierney, Brad Parks and their
interdisciplinary team of faculty, staff, and students have helped position the
AidData initiative, and the university, at the forefront of the aid
transparency movement and the global development research community.”

Leading the
new Center from W&M will be Michael Tierney, co-director of the Institute
for the Theory and Practice of International Relations, and Brad Parks, the co-executive
director of AidData. They conceived the project to build the Project-Level Aid
Database (PLAID), AidData’s precursor, as a student-faculty research project in
2003. Tierney and Parks also led the effort that resulted in the USAID award.

Each year, governments and international
organizations provide approximately $160 billion to finance development
projects in the world's poorest countries. A recent movement to increase aid
transparency has made vast amounts of foreign aid data available to the public.
However, the data are scattered, buried in complex and unstandardized reporting
systems and obscured in spreadsheets that require great effort and technical
skill to interpret.

The AidData Center for Development Policy will use innovative geo-referencing
technologies to map foreign aid activities at the sub-national level. These
maps, which contain extraordinary amounts of easy to understand data, represent
one important step toward the democratization of aid information. They have also
revealed surprising trends that have changed the way that development agencies
and governments are thinking about foreign aid.

Parks believes
that the creation of the AidData Center for Development Policy will “fundamentally change the way that
foreign assistance is targeted, monitored, and evaluated.”

“The Center will build a global network of
geographers, health scientists, economists, political scientists, computer
scientists, and statisticians who are committed to helping USAID and other
development agencies reduce the cost and increase the impact of their aid
programs,” Parks said. “The Center will also empower the intended beneficiaries
of aid with the information needed to hold their own governments and
development agencies accountable for results.”

Other Center initiatives include the creation of
opportunities for entrepreneurs, development practitioners, scientists, and
non-profits to innovate with geocoded aid information and the continued development of open source software and
web-based tools that allow anyone to visualize, overlay, correlate, and analyze
diverse data sources.

According to Tierney, this type of transparency is vital to
the future of development aid.

"U.S.
citizens are happy to invest some of their taxpayer dollars in efforts to
combat disease, poverty, and environmental degradation," Tierney said.
"They are not happy to see their money spent to prop up corrupt
governments. Making aid transparent reduces opportunities for waste and
corruption."

Tierney believes the Center will not only
have a large impact in the world of development but will help William &
Mary realize some of its strategic objectives in promoting interdisciplinary collaborations,
student-faculty research, and internationalization. “In addition to providing
better data and evidence to policymakers who make decisions with far-reaching
consequences, this award will dramatically increase our capacity to engage
students and faculty in cutting-edge, interdisciplinary research geared towards
solving real world problems. We are already reaching beyond the usual suspects
in the Economics and Government Departments in order to engage our colleagues
in other departments and programs. We have a great deal to learn from each
other.”

AidData Center

The mission of the AidData Center for Development Policy is to create geospatial data and tools that enable USAID and the broader global development community to more effectively target, coordinate, deliver, and evaluate aid. More...

Mapping Aid

The AidData Center for Development Policy will create geospatial data and tools that enable the global development community to more effectively target, coordinate, deliver, and evaluate aid.

AidData Research

"As researchers I think what we really strive for is to make donors accountable for the commitments they make to developing countries." Alex Miller '13

AidData at W&M

"AidData's success is proof that W&M's support of internationalization, interdisciplinarity, and student-faculty collaboration leads to research that is changing the world." Mike Tierney, Director of the Institute for the Theory and Practice of International Relations and co-founder of AidData More...